]]>OTTAWA – A military inquiry has concluded that Canadian soldiers were not instructed to ignore incidents of Afghan soldiers and interpreters sexually assaulting young boys.

The board of inquiry also said the Forces could have taken action on how to handle possible abuse of minors in 2006 but not enough information was shared between soldiers deployed in Afghanistan and commanders back in Canada.

It would take two years for the Forces to act and that only happened after one soldier went to the media with allegations of a cover up.

The board of inquiry’s report into the allegations was completed in 2010 but it took six years for the chief of defence staff to sign off and make it public.

The delay is attributed to the scope of the recommendations and competing military priorities.

But the report notes the military has been working since 2008 to resolve the issue of how allegations of this nature should be handled, including a directive sent that year from the chief of defence staff that soldiers had the authority and responsibility to report any incidents of abuse.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/soldiers-not-ordered-to-turn-blind-eye-to-afghan-child-abuse-inquiry/feed/0Case of pregnant 10 year old in Paraguay generates protestshttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/case-of-pregnant-10-year-old-in-paraguay-generates-protests/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/case-of-pregnant-10-year-old-in-paraguay-generates-protests/#commentsTue, 12 May 2015 07:46:25 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=718415Monday's rally in Ciudad del Este drew 200 people under the banner of "No More Abuse!'' and participants said it was unprecedented in this city

]]>CIUDAD DEL ESTE, Paraguay – The fate of a pregnant 10-year-old has not only become a national debate in Paraguay but has underscored what activists say is a problem with child rape in this poor South American nation and led other victims to speak out.

Cristina Britez de Mendoza is the director of a shelter for troubled youth in Ciudad del Este, a gritty and bustling town of 350,000 that sits across the border from Brazil and Argentina. She said many of the children she works with have been sexually abused, such as a 12-year-old girl who gave birth last month. The girl lives at the shelter with the baby.

“When the other children play, this girl wants to play, too,” said Britez de Mendoza, who attended a rally to demand stiffer penalties for sex abusers. “She is still a child.”

Monday’s rally in Ciudad del Este drew 200 people under the banner of “No More Abuse!” and participants said it was unprecedented in this city with little culture of social protest. Another protest was held in the capital of Asuncion.

The rallies came amid a fierce debate over what is best for the 10-year-old rape victim who is being denied an abortion. In Paraguay, the procedure is banned in all cases – even rape – except when the mother’s life is in danger.

The decision to not give the girl an abortion has sparked international and local condemnation, with United Nations human rights experts on Monday blasting Paraguay for failing to protect her.

“The Paraguayan authorities’ decision results in grave violations of the rights to life, to health, and to the physical and mental integrity of the girl as well as her right to education, jeopardizing her economic and social opportunities,” the four experts said in a statement.

Looking on at Monday’s protest in Ciudad del Este, a 17-year-old told The Associated Press she had been repeatedly raped by her stepfather from the time she was 9 until she was 14, when she told her mom about the abuse.

“If I had seen protests like this before, maybe I would have spoken up sooner, or maybe it wouldn’t have happened to me,” said the girl, who is not being identified in line with The Associated Press policy of not naming the victims of sexual abuse.

She said her mother confronted her stepfather, who denied the abuse and still lives in the house. The girl said she is now physically strong enough to fend off his advances, but for a few years she was afraid of men and ate heavily to make herself less attractive.

“I try not to be at home so I don’t have to see him,” she said through tears. “He makes me sick.”

About 600 girls 14 or under become pregnant each year in this country of 6.8 million people. Studies by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control say thousands of children in the United States also give birth each year.

In Paraguay “these cases are very common. What’s needed is the political will to get us out of this hole,” said Britez de Mendoza, who runs the shelter in Ciudad del Este.

In the case of the 10-year-old, the girl’s stepfather, who is accused of raping her, was arrested over the weekend and placed in isolation to prevent other inmates from attacking him. The girl’s mother is being held at a female prison for neglecting to take care of her daughter.

In response to the calls for a therapeutic abortion for the girl, Paraguayan Health Minister Antonio Barrios has responded that she is in good health at a hospital and that the pregnancy, at five months, is too advanced.

The president of the country’s Episcopal Conference, Msgr. Claudio Gimenez, decried the possibility of a therapeutic abortion, saying Paraguay is already split over the case.

“Some want to legalize abortion, the killing of an innocent who still is in a period of gestation,” he said. “And for the other side, those who oppose that idea.”

Some protesters said they thought the controversial case of the 10-year-old is the tip of the iceberg.

“How many thousands of other girls are raped and we just don’t hear about it because they don’t have the baby or don’t report it?” said Sebastian Martinez, 34.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/case-of-pregnant-10-year-old-in-paraguay-generates-protests/feed/1At least 786 U.S. kids died of abuse or neglect while under watchhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/world/at-least-786-u-s-kids-died-of-abuse-or-neglect-while-under-watch/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/at-least-786-u-s-kids-died-of-abuse-or-neglect-while-under-watch/#respondThu, 18 Dec 2014 09:41:08 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=654283The children died in a six-year span, in plain view of child protection authorities – many of them beaten, starved or left alone to drown

]]>BUTTE, Mon. – At least 786 children died of abuse or neglect in the U.S. in a six-year span in plain view of child protection authorities – many of them beaten, starved or left alone to drown while agencies had good reason to know they were in danger, The Associated Press has found.

To determine that number, the AP canvassed the 50 states, the District of Columbia and all branches of the military – circumventing a system that does a terrible job of accounting for child deaths. Many states struggled to provide numbers. Secrecy often prevailed.

Most of the 786 children whose cases were compiled by the AP were under the age of 4. They lost their lives even as authorities were investigating their families or providing some form of protective services because of previous instances of neglect, violence or other troubles in the home.

Take Mattisyn Blaz, a 2-month-old from Montana who died when her father spiked her “like a football,” in the words of a prosecutor.

Matthew Blaz was well-known to child services personnel and police. Just two weeks after Mattisyn was born on June 25, 2013, he came home drunk, grabbed his wife by her hair and threw her to the kitchen floor while she clung to the newborn. He snatched the baby from her arms, giving her back only when Jennifer Blaz called police.

Jennifer Blaz said a child protective services worker visited the day after her husband’s attack, spoke with her briefly and left. Her husband pleaded guilty to assault and was ordered by a judge to take anger management classes and stay away from his wife.

She said the next official contact between the family and Montana child services came more than six weeks later – the day of Mattisyn’s funeral.

The system also failed Ethan Henderson, who was only 10 weeks old but already had been treated for a broken arm when his father hurled him into a recliner so hard that it caused a fatal brain injury.

Maine hotline workers had received at least 13 calls warning that Ethan or his siblings were suffering abuse – including assertions that an older sister had been found covered in bruises, was possibly being sexually abused and had been burned by a stove because she was left unsupervised.

Ethan himself had arrived at daycare with deep red bruises dappling his arm.

Still, the caseworker who inspected the family’s cramped trailer six days before Ethan died on May 8, 2012, wrote that the baby appeared “well cared for and safe in the care of his parents.”

___

LACK OF GOVERNMENT DATA

Because no single, complete set of data exists for the deaths of children who already were being overseen by child protective services workers, the information compiled over the course of AP’s eight-month investigation represents the most comprehensive statistics publicly available.

The AP reviewed thousands of pages of official reports, child fatality records and police documents for the period in question, which ran from fiscal year 2008 through 2013.

And, even then, the number of abuse and neglect fatalities where a prior open case existed at the time of death is undoubtedly much higher than the tally of 760.

Seven states reported a total of 230 open-case child deaths over the six-year period, but those were not included in the AP count because the states could not make a distinction between investigations started due to the incident that ultimately led to a child’s death and cases that already were open when the child received the fatal injury.

Some states did not provide data for all six years, not all branches of the military provided complete information, and no count of open-case deaths of any type was obtained from the Bureau of Indian Affairs or FBI, which investigate allegations of abuse on reservations.

The lack of comprehensive data makes it difficult to measure how well those responsible for keeping children safe are protecting their most vulnerable charges.

The data collection system on child deaths is so flawed that no one can even say with accuracy how many children overall die from abuse or neglect every year. The federal government estimates an average of about 1,650 deaths annually in recent years; many believe the actual number is twice as high.

Even more lacking is comprehensive, publicly available data about the number of children dying while the subject of an open case or while receiving assistance from the agencies that exist to keep them safe _ the focus of AP’s reporting.

When asked to explain why so many children with open cases have died at the hands of their caretakers, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the nation’s major child abuse prevention programs, said the agency had no immediate response.

But spokeswoman Laura Goulding said colleagues wanted to know more about how the AP derived its figures. “Are you willing to share your source for that?” she wrote in an email.

States submit information on child abuse deaths to the federal government on a voluntary basis – some of it comprehensive, some of it inaccurate.

For instance, a significant number of deaths were not reported to the South Carolina team reviewing child deaths in the state, said Perry Simpson, director of the South Carolina Legislative Audit Council. That meant the data the review team provided the federal government was wrong.

And a judge in Kentucky issued a scathing order last year against the state’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services for wilfully circumventing open records laws and failing to release full records on child abuse deaths, fining the agency $765,000.

“There can be no effective prevention when there is no public examination of the underlying facts,” Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd said.

In some cases, states withhold information about child deaths in violation of the terms of federal grants they receive.

HHS says all states receiving grants under a prevention and treatment program must “allow the public to access information when child abuse or neglect results in a child fatality,” unless those details would put children, their families or those who report child abuse at risk, or jeopardize an investigation.

In addition, grants issued under a section of the Social Security Act are tied to a requirement that states describe how they calculate data on child maltreatment deaths submitted to the federal government.

Still, no state has ever been found to be in violation of disclosure requirements and federal grants have never been withheld, according to Catherine Nolan, who directs the Office on Child Abuse and Neglect, a sub-agency of HHS.

“Obviously, the overarching goal is always keeping the children safe from harm. It’s a matter of how the states have decided they want to do it,” Nolan said.

The information that states provide to the federal government through the voluntary system also is severely lacking. A 2013 report showed that 17 states did not provide the federal government with a key measure of performance: how many children had died of child abuse after being removed from their homes and then reunited with their families within a five- year period.

Withholding information about such fatalities allows child protective agencies to shroud their activities – and their failures. It also leaves a major void for researchers and policy makers looking for ways to identify and protect the children in risky situations.

“We all agree that we cannot solve a problem this complex until we agree it exists,” said David Sanders, chairman of the federal Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities, whose members have been travelling the country studying child deaths under a congressional mandate.

“If, for example, you want to fix something like fatalities due to children being left alone, it seems that it would be important to know how often that is happening and what it looks like to come up with a solution,” he said.

The child welfare system is fragmented, with hundreds of different agencies – from state governments to county offices, tribes and the military – operating by their own set of standards.

Some states, like New York and Ohio, have county-administered systems, with data collection and retention scattered. In others, a state agency provides child welfare services. And still others, such as Florida, have privatized some child welfare operations.

And because there is no single definition of what constitutes abuse or neglect, what is counted as maltreatment in one locality may not be in another.

___

MONTANA SECRETS

Nowhere was the AP‘s challenge steeper than Montana, where the state’s confidentiality law allows the child protective services agency to operate with impunity. The AP discovered the Department of Public Health and Human Services’ involvement in Mattisyn Blaz’s short life, and her death, only by examining hundreds of pages of court files from the criminal trial of her father.

The state makes public only the number of children who died from maltreatment in a given year. Officials said state law prohibits them from releasing details on the number of children who died after having a prior history with child protective services.

Department spokesman Jon Ebelt acknowledged Montana law conflicts with federal disclosure requirements and said officials would seek a change in state law to allow for the disclosure of more information.

As part of the blanket secrecy, it is not clear what, if anything, child welfare authorities did to help Mattisyn Blaz.

Based on information obtained from the court file, it is clear that Matthew Blaz’s violent streak was known to authorities. His former girlfriend had accused him of assaulting her while she cradled their 9-week-old son in 2011. He attacked his wife, Jennifer, at least twice in 2012, on one occasion dragging her around the house by her hair. She told authorities he regularly threatened to kill her.

Mattisyn’s older half-sister – 10 at the time – cowered under a bed after Blaz threatened to come after her and was so afraid she began sleeping with a knife nearby, the children’s grandmother said.

The protective order issued in July 2013 should have prevented Matthew Blaz from remaining in the home, but soon he was back with the family. “I honestly thought after I bailed him out and we talked, and with the no alcohol, you know, and him going to AA, I really thought things were going to change,” his wife said.

When Jennifer Blaz went to work on Aug. 16, 2013, she left her husband to care for the girls. For reasons still unknown, he became enraged and threw the baby, fracturing her skull and causing other devastating injuries, according to prosecutor Samm Cox.

Later that day, he loaded the children into his car and drove across town to pick up a chain saw that had been repaired and then stopped for some sandwiches. He dropped one off to his wife at work, but never mentioned anything was wrong with the baby.

When Matthew picked his wife up that afternoon, he calmly told her that a 12-year-old neighbourhood boy had dropped Mattisyn earlier in the day. Jennifer noticed the baby didn’t look right and called for an ambulance.

By then, it was too late for little Mattisyn.

Last month, Matthew Blaz was sentenced to life in prison, with no possibility of parole.

___

A SYSTEM STILL FAILING

When President Richard Nixon signed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act into law in 1974, it was seen as a sign of federal commitment to preventing child abuse through state-level monitoring.

But in 1995, a board reviewing the progress that had been made issued a scathing report headlined “A Nation’s Shame: Fatal Child Abuse and Neglect in the United States.”

The report called for better information and transparency, and flagged “serious gaps in data collection.” ”Until we develop more comprehensive and sophisticated data, our efforts to understand and prevent child maltreatment-related deaths will be severely handicapped,” it said.

Nearly 20 years later, the AP found that many such problems persist.

Michael Petit, who was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the federal Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities, said meetings have been fruitful but will bring no substantive change unless Congress requires states to do more.

“The child safety net in this country is not equal to the size of the problem that’s coming at it,” said Petit, the former head of Maine’s child protective services agency and founder of the advocacy group Every Child Matters. “The system overall is in crisis.”

That system is plagued with worker shortages and a serious overload of cases. For instance, a caseworker in Texas who investigated abuse reports about a 2-year-old who eventually died in the care of his mother was juggling 37 cases a few weeks before he died.

In addition:

– Budgets are tight, and some experts say funding shortages lead to more deaths. Conditions improved when Alabama spent more money on child welfare as part of a 15-year federal consent decree. But since 2007, when the decree ended, funding has shrunk nearly every year – and the number of open-case deaths has started to climb, from one in 2009 to five in 2013.

– Insufficient training for those who answer child abuse hotlines leads to reports being misclassified, sometimes with deadly consequences. In Arizona, a June 2013 call about an 8-month-old with a suspicious broken arm was logged incorrectly and not investigated. The girl died of a brain injury about a month later, after being burned on the face with a cigarette lighter and shaken violently.

– The lack of a comprehensive national child welfare database that would allow caseworkers to keep track of individual cases, child by child, means some abusive caregivers known to authorities can slip through the cracks by crossing state lines.

– A policy that promotes keeping families intact plays a major role in the number of deaths, because children remain in abusive situations. According to Vermont police, 2-year-old Dezirae Sheldon was left in her home even after suffering two broken legs under suspicious circumstances. Caseworkers said they’d felt “an overwhelming push” to keep the family together, based on their general training. Dezirae died in February from blunt force trauma to the head; her stepfather is charged with second-degree murder. A police detective wrote: “This focus on reunification very often puts the needs of the parents often above the needs and interest of the child or victim.”

– Worst of all, nearly 40 per cent of the 3 million child abuse and neglect complaints made annually to child protective services hotlines in the U.S. are “screened out” and never investigated.

___

FAILURE AT ITS EXTREME

The case of 10-week-old Ethan Henderson – whose family in Arundel, Maine, had been the subject of at least 13 calls to child protective services – presents a particularly telling example of a repeated systemic failure.

Only two of those calls were investigated – one involving Ethan and his twin brother, and the other, their sister. In addition, more than a half-dozen physicians, nurses and other caregivers failed to report signs that the blue-eyed boy with wispy blond hair was being terribly hurt. Some have escaped scrutiny and punishment to this day.

Maine child welfare officials said the state’s confidentiality law prohibited them from discussing details about their involvement in Ethan’s case. Records obtained by AP, however, suggest the state missed numerous opportunities to properly assess the safety of Ethan and his siblings, neglecting to follow up promptly even after identifying warning signs.

According to evidence produced as part of the criminal case against Ethan’s father, Gordon Collins-Faunce, the police made two of those calls but hotline workers decided that neither merited a response.

Ethan’s grandmother, Jan Collins, said she called the hotline just before the twins were born because she feared her son and another man who frequented the family’s mobile home could hurt the children.

“I said I thought Gordon was delusional. They just dismissed that,” she said. “I kept thinking that tomorrow I will find out that the state has gotten involved.”

The twins were born a few weeks premature on Feb. 21, 2012 – and just four weeks later, Ethan’s mother took him to a nearby hospital with a broken left arm. She told his pediatrician that Ethan’s father had accidentally twisted it lifting the baby from his crib. The doctor never reported the injury, even though Maine law requires physicians to immediately report possible child abuse.

About a month later, Ethan arrived at daycare unable to move his neck and with dark bruises on his right arm. Workers took photos of the bruises, but never reported them, said Maine Police Det. Lauren Edstrom, who investigated Ethan’s death. The next week, Ethan arrived at daycare with such a high fever that workers called his mother to take him to the hospital, evidence shows.

When Ethan was nearly 10 weeks old, a family friend finally called the hotline to report bruises on the twins and a white, blistering burn on their sister’s hand. Edstrom said the friend decided to tell hotline workers she was a daycare volunteer so that they would take the report seriously. That represented the second report worthy of investigation.

Melissa Guillerault, the child welfare agency worker dispatched to the grey double-wide trailer on May 2, called ahead to let the family know she was coming. Still, she found Collins-Faunce and his wife had five bags of trash on the porch.

Though the state later acknowledged Guillerault learned of Ethan’s earlier broken arm during that visit, records show she found the couple to be “co-operative and engaging.” She said the children “appeared clean, healthy and comfortable,” although she didn’t inspect them for bruises. In a section of her report designated for the listing of “signs of danger,” the worker wrote: “None at this time.”

Three days later, according to Collins-Faunce’s confession to police, he grew so frustrated by Ethan’s cries that he picked up his son by the head and threw him into a chair, causing severe brain damage. Before calling 911, evidence shows he went outside to smoke and play the video game “Police Pursuit.”

Ethan died three days later, on May 8, 2012. His father was convicted of manslaughter last year; his siblings were placed in foster care and adopted.

Virginia McNamara, a pediatric nurse who visited Ethan at his home and never reported the signs of possible abuse, lost her license to practice in Maine. Ethan’s pediatrician, Dr. Lisa Gouldsbrough, was never disciplined, although she received a letter of guidance from the Maine board that licenses osteopathic doctors aimed at helping her “in avoiding complaints of this nature in the future.” Guillerault was promoted to a supervisory role within the department, a position she still holds.

None of them responded to AP‘s requests for comment, and neither did the Maine Department of Health and Human Services.

The records that spell out the state’s involvement with the family remain secret.

In August, Quebec Justice Valmont Beaulieu stated the obvious when he addressed the double standard in the treatment of teachers who have sex with students: “The sexual exploitation of a male adolescent by a female teacher must be punished just the same as a male posing the same actions toward a female adolescent,” he said before sentencing Tania Pontbriand to 20- and 18-month jail terms to be served concurrently, plus two years probation. The former high school gym teacher from Rosemère, Que., had been found guilty of sexual exploitation and sexual assault of a male student with whom she had a two-year relationship.

The trial made headlines internationally. Its details, by turns tawdry and disturbing, revealed how the then 30-year-old Pontbriand acted as mentor, conﬁdante and sexual aggressor to the 15-year-old. She gained the trust of the teenager, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, when they exchanged intimate details during a 2002 school cycling trip. He described the pain he felt after his parents’ divorce; she told him her marriage was a mistake. When the student returned home, he told his mother he had a “new best friend.” Pontbriand initiated sex with the boy soon after on a private trip approved by his mother to help him with his problems; it was the ﬁrst of some 300 sexual liaisons that took place on school trips, private getaways, at his home and her home. The teacher bought the boy a cellphone after his mother tried to shut down communication between the two. Evidence shown to the court included coded messages left in the student’s locker and gifts such as the engraved dog tags the teacher gave the student after their ﬁrst sexual encounter: “BFF. Best Friends Forever. 19-05-02.”

In a written statement, the student stated that Pontbriand ended it after he entered CEGEP, saying she’d met someone new. He went to police in 2007 after being expelled; later he claimed the relationship left him depressed and suicidal. The victim, now in his 20s, said a psychiatrist helped him understand he’d missed out on normal dating rituals. Pontbriand, now a mother of two, alienated him from family and friends, he said, “so as to satisfy her own egotistic and sexual desires. I was far too naive at the time to recognize her lies and manipulation.” The judge agreed: “The court is convinced that the accused used the victim to satisfy her own sexual needs, thus exploiting the victim’s naïveté, his lack of maturity, his dependence and his trust.”

Canadian law is clear that a minimum jail sentence must occur in sexual charges involving children, meaning those under age 16, the age of consent; when an adult is in a position of authority or trust, however, that age rises to 18. Yet a cultural double standard persists in attitudes toward and legal treatment of male and female teachers who sexually exploit students. Men routinely face jail time. Women do not. Sentencing in the Pont­briand case, as well as the two-year prison term given former Calgary school teacher Jennifer Mason in July for sexually exploiting a 16-year-old, recognize the severity of the crime. Yet they’re exceptions.

In April, Kim Gervais, a 37-year-old former elementary school teacher in Timmins, Ont., was given seven months in jail and two years of probation for “abhorrent” breach of trust after pleading guilty to three counts of sexual interference and one count of inviting for a sexual purpose involving four male students who were 12 and 13 at the time. Conditional sentences are common. In March, 59-year-old Deborah Marion Ralph, a former Langley, B.C., elementary school teacher, avoided jail after pleading guilty to sexual interference with a student who was 11 when a three-year relationship began in 1998; Ralph was 44. The Crown called for three years incarceration for “egregious breach of trust.” Ralph received 18 months house arrest, six months curfew and community service.

The entrenched belief that men are propelled by lust, women by emotional need, shadowed Ralph’s case, as it does others involving female teachers. A psychiatrist for Ralph’s defence reported the former teacher suffered from “teacher-lover” syndrome, a clinical term dating to the late 1980s to describe teachers, usually female, who believe they’re in a consensual romantic relationship with students. Ralph’s feelings for the boy grew out of a desire to help others, the court heard; she equated her feelings with “young love,” and she connected with the boy better than she did with her husband of more than 20 years. Crown counsel David Simpkin presented a more nefarious scenario: “[Ralph] appears to be bored, looking for some spice in her life and chose the victim,” he said. “She doesn’t appear to have any insight into the harm she has caused.” Justice Selwyn Romilly was sympathetic to Ralph, concluding the grandmother didn’t pose a danger to the community and shows “considerable remorse.”

When a male is a victim of a female, society doesn’t take it as seriously, says Robert Shoop, a professor of education law at Kansas State University and an internationally recognized expert on sexual harassment and abuse prevention in schools. A male having sex with a minor child is recognized as a horror, which of course it is, he says. “But in cases where a female had sex with a minor boy, there have been many examples of judges saying, ‘Where’s the harm here? He bragged to his friends about it, how could he be hurt?’ ” Judges tend to reﬂect community values, says Shoop, and generally [in the U.S.] judges are over 50 and male. One of those values, he says, is that women are powerless and need to be protected from sex-addled males, whatever their age.

Attitudes are shaped too by a popular culture that celebrates “MILFs” (“mothers I’d like to f–k”) and dismisses sexually voracious older women as “cougars.” Male teachers who have sex with underage female students are viewed as statutory rapists or creeps; women who do the same are perceived as doing the boy a favour or providing a rite of passage, evidenced by the inevitable “Where was she when I was in high school?” cracks.

“When a woman is involved, the language is different,” says clinical forensic psychologist Franca Cortoni, a professor at Université de Montréal who studies female sexual offenders, a ﬁeld of research in its infancy. Female teachers who sexually exploit students, usually male, is one of three known categories of female sexual offender, Cortoni says. (Others are women who sexually abuse a child or teenager with another adult, often a partner, and women who abuse young children, usually under their care.) Female sexual offenders have always existed but have not been studied until recently, says Cortoni, the co-editor of Female Sexual Offenders: Theory, Assessment, and Treatment, published in 2010. “They don’t ﬁt with society’s views of what women are supposed to be like.” They comprise only four to ﬁve per cent of all sex offenders, she reports; women were behind one to two per cent of all sexual crimes reported to police in Canada between 2000 and 2010.

Cortoni hasn’t studied female teachers specifically, she says: “I haven’t been able to get data.” Canada’s national sex-offender registry doesn’t provide gender breakdown for “privacy reasons.” A recent freedom of information search in Wales, however, showed female sex offenders in that part of Britain were the fastest growing category, more than doubling from 78 in 2009 to 193 in 2012 (the number of male sex offenders rose 67.5 per cent from 3,655 to 6,122). We’re just beginning to understand sexual abuse by female teachers and its consequences, says Shoop, who calls it “abhorrent behaviour that’s epidemic.” People don’t appreciate how frequently it occurs, he says: “The conversation is probably where the abuse of children by priests was 10 years ago.”

The sensationalized template for the female-teacher-and-male-student relationship remains mired in the decades-old spectacle of California teacher Mary Kay LeTourneau, a married 34-year-old mother of four who was jailed in 1997 for second-degree rape of her 12-year-old student, Vili Fualaau. LeTourneau was reincarcerated after breaking probation; police found her having sex with Fualaau in her car. The couple, who would have two children and marry, turned their “illicit love” into an industry with a tabloid-ready happy ending: Entertainment Tonight aired their 2005 wedding as an “exclusive,” they co-authored a book, Only One Crime, Love, and hosted “Hot for Teacher Night” at a Seattle club.

Media, along with screenwriters, are complicit in shaping attitudes, says Shoop, who points to criminal behaviour being referred to as a “steamy affair,” or rape referred to as an “inappropriate relationship.” It’s a confusion writ large culturally: Netﬂix categorizes A Teacher—a very bad movie about a sexual relationship between an unhinged young female high school teacher and her male student—under “romance.”

Over the past year, we’ve seen a barrage of allegations and stories involving female teachers having sex with students. This month, the Internet exploded when two Louisiana teachers, Shelley Dufresne, 32, and Rachel Respess, 24, were arrested for “carnal knowledge of a minor,” for allegedly engaging in a ménage à trois with a 16-year-old male student after he bragged about it. In early October, 44-year-old Ottawa teaching assistant Kathy Kitts was charged with a series of felonies stemming from allegations she conducted a two-year relationship with a male student, starting when he was 15. And last week Charlotte Parker, a married 32-year-old British teaching assistant, was given a 12-month suspended prison sentence after admitting to a two-year sexual relationship with a male student that began when he was 14.; Parker threatened suicide after the teenager’s parents found out.

The unspoken assumption among researchers is that cases involving teachers are under-reported, says Cortoni. It’s believed boys self-disclose more than girls while the relationship is ongoing, says Shoop—“they’re pretty excited and proud of it.” Still, generally only ﬁve to 15 per cent of people who are abused ever tell anybody, he says.

Public records of provincial bodies governing teachers provide only a glimpse of a bigger story. Disclosure is uneven: Ontario and B.C. provide disciplinary actions online but other provinces, including those in the Maritimes, do not. Gabrielle Barkany, spokesperson for the Ontario College of Teachers, says there has been no increase in female teachers’ licences being revoked for sexually related misconduct in recent years: “Our statistics do not indicate an increase or a speciﬁc trend.” Yet many cases involving teachers, both male and female, don’t come to trial or public scrutiny. Of the 32 teaching licences revoked in Ontario in 2013 by the college, 28 were for sexually related misconduct; of the 28, only one was female. Ten of the 15 revocations in 2012 were for sexually related misconduct; three involved female teachers. Of those four women over the two years, only one faced criminal charges: high school teacher Jill Sparks of Whitby, Ont., was sentenced to 45 days in jail and one year of house arrest in 2009 after pleading guilty to sexual interference and assault of a 14-year-old boy.

Schools also can appear to ignore allegations, revealed in the 2013 trial of former teacher Bonnie McLachlan of Prince Albert, Sask., who was found guilty of sexually exploiting a 15-year-old in 1993-94; she avoided jail, instead receiving 18 months of house arrest, but was allowed to keep working. The former student went to authorities in 2010. As recounted in the Crown’s failed appeal for a harsher sentence, the administration of Queen Mary school was notiﬁed of McLachlan’s relationship with the student at the time by teaching assistant Wanda Kent, who reported that McLachlan told her she and the student were having sex in her car. McLachlan’s behaviour was even more flagrant: she was seen rubbing up against the Grade 9 student at his locker and kissing him in a hot tub on a school trip.

But Kent would be the one professionally sidelined; she was assigned to the photocopy room and eventually left teaching altogether. McLachlan, on the other hand, was suspended with pay before landing at another school. She taught until 2008.

Women are given more lenient sentencing than men, says Shoop, who has served as a forensic expert in hundreds of sexual abuse cases in the U.S. “My experience has been that females get time served and probation, where men get 15 years for the same offence,” he says. A 2012 University of Michigan study, “Estimating gender discrimination in federal criminal cases,” found a gender divide in sentencing generally in the U.S.: men received 63 per cent longer sentences on average than women, and women were twice as likely to avoid incarceration if found guilty. Two decisions involving former Oregon high school teachers, found guilty of having sex with students earlier this year, bear this out. Denise Keesee, 39, received 30 days in jail and ﬁve years probation for two counts involving a 16-year-old male student. In another jurisdiction, 56-year-old Charles McLauchlin was sentenced to almost 10 years in prison for second-degree sexual abuse and online corruption of a minor involving a 16-year-old female student.

The conditional sentences given both female and male teachers reﬂect the fact they’re seen to be pillars of the community: public disgrace and being listed on the national sex-offender registry is considered punishment enough. But in sentencing 30-year-old Jennifer Mason to prison in July, Alberta provincial court Judge Sean Dunnigan made clear that it was the court’s duty to denounce and deter behaviour that included “a breach of trust” and “grooming, insinuation into the life of the student and family.”

The trust accorded female teachers is precisely what allows them to offend, the Alberta Crown argued in its unsuccessful appeal of Bonnie McLachlan’s conditional sentence: “It was because of, and not in spite of, her status and the regard parents had for her that she was able to pursue her relationship with ‘S’ [the unnamed student] and abuse him for as long as she did.”

Testimony from cases involving female teachers illustrate the extent to which they earned the boy’s family’s trust: Tania Pontbriand and her husband were given a $5,000 pool by her victim’s family. Students frequently spend time at the teacher’s home, often on the pretext of babysitting. Pontbriand’s victim spent time with the teacher and her husband. The Deborah Marion Ralph trial revealed the teacher “groomed” the 11-year-old—paying him to clean her pool, taking him on outings, shopping for him, and having him to her house for sleepovers. Similarly, Jennifer Mason began contact with her victim when he was 14; she waited until he was 16 before they had sex.

Teachers’ behaviour in many cases oscillates between cold calculation and that of impetuous, immature adolescents. Mason and her victim watched Disney movies after their motel-room trysts. Pontbriand signed an email “your friend 4eva.” The teachers, often married with children, behave in a reckless manner, exploiting the power imbalance with a less-experienced, besotted partner. British teaching assistant Charlotte Parker shared 3,000 WhatsApp messages with the student during their relationship.

Testimony from teachers’ disciplinary hearings also reveals a stunning lack of judgment—and lack of professional boundaries: Toronto teacher Nathalie Champagne lost her licence in 2012 for violations that included engaging in “acts of a sexual nature” with a 16-year-old while his friends watched on video conference. In 2013, Ottawa teacher Andréane Hélène Cadieux lost her licence for inappropriate behaviour that included “exposing her breasts” during an online chat with a student. School boards routinely provide guidelines on “appropriate” social media interactions. The Ontario College of Teachers advises teachers against even becoming Facebook friends with students, spokesperson Barkany says.

Shoop, author of the 2003 book Sexual Exploitation of Students: How to Spot it and Stop It, says that grooming entails identifying susceptible students: “You don’t know whether it’s intentional—that this person is setting the kid up—or that she’s ﬂirting, sending gifts and texts, then crosses boundaries. Either way, the kid is generally ﬂattered.” He has heard teachers report they fell “in love”: “I’ve seen 40-year-old women writing the boy’s name on her hand like they’re teenage girls,” he says. “I’ve not had many cases of female serial predators, though there have been women who’ve had sex with more than one child or who had sex with several children at the same time.”

Cortoni rejects the term “predator,” coined by American lawmakers in the 1990s. Canadian experts in the ﬁeld don’t use it, she says, noting it’s not accurate or useful: “When you think of predators, you think of monsters—the Paul Bernardos. But 85 to 90 per cent of sex offenders are people the victim knows and loves—someone who makes them feel loved. That’s what people forget.”

The term creates dissonance for the victim, she says: “There’s this idea that boys want to go to bed with an older women—it’s a cultural fantasy. But if the kid is not comfortable, how does he report—how does he go against these messages that it’s a cool thing to have sex with an older woman?”

Theories about the female sex offender remain tentative. What is known, Cortoni says, is that female and male sex offenders differ in significant ways: where men have difficulties establishing intimate emotional relationships and show lack of concern for others, women have the reverse problem: “They’re over-dependent.” Another key difference, she says, is that female sex offenders don’t see all children as sexual beings the way male sexual offenders do, but they do see their own victim in a sexual way. Absent is any concept of ethics or boundaries or professionalism, says Shoop. But students, too, haven’t been educated as to what is acceptable or unacceptable behaviour, he says. The 16-year-old who claimed to have a threesome with his teachers was shocked to learn they could go to prison.

The notion that teenage boys can be victims of women runs against an entrenched cultural grain: “The belief is that all teenage boys want sex—an assumption that can be pretty much be veriﬁed—so therefore they can’t be raped or that nothing that happens to them could actually do harm,” says Shoop. Males stop being seen as victims when they hit adolescence, says American psychologist David Lisak: “We recognize that male children can be abused, but when boys cross some kind of threshold in adolescence and become what we perceive to be men, we no longer want to think about it in this way.” The fact that boys are prone to locker-room boasting also ﬁgures in judicial decisions. That was apparent in the case of Mary Gowans, a former Toronto French teacher acquitted in 2012 of charges of sexual involvement with her former Grade 8 student; the Crown presented evidence that Gowans exchanged more than 2,000 texts with the former student, some after midnight and on holidays. Judge John McMahon said he had “trouble” with the timing of the texts, before dismissing the case in part because of inconsistencies in the boy’s testimony: “I was left with the impression he simply had a schoolboy crush on Ms. Gowans,” and fabricated tales to “impress friends.’’

Men bristle at the sexual victim label: On the tabloid TV show Inside Edition, Vili Fualaau denied he’d been preyed upon: “I’m not a victim . . . I’m not ashamed of being in love with Mary Kay.”

Recognition that men can be sexual victims has been slow. A 1998 U.S. National Institute of Justice survey found one in 33 men will be the victims of sexual violence in their lifetimes; the FBI didn’t update the legal deﬁnition of rape to include men until 2012. Controversial “made to penetrate cases” are reframing the subject: in 2013, Chicago resident Cierra Ross was charged with picking up a stranger in her car and forcing him to have sex with another woman at gunpoint. New data from the U.S. military is also reshaping perceptions. A Pentagon report found reporting of sexual assault in the military rose 50 per cent between 2012 and 2013, in part due to increased awareness of sexual trauma; still, it’s believed adult men disclose at a lower rate than women. Incidence is being revealed in other ways. The 2014 documentary It Was a Woman, by Canadian Cherri Low Horn, who was abused by a woman as a child, focused the lens on female offenders. In it, Ottawa social worker Rick Goodwin, co-founder of the Men’s Project counselling group at the YMCA, reports that between one-third to one-quarter of the men he sees were sexually abused by a woman.

The situation can be especially complicated with children, says Shoop: “It’s difﬁcult for people to understand that a boy, like a girl, can willingly participate, even enjoy the experience, but still be exploited,” he says. “We assume that children have to perceive damage for damage to have occurred; but there is long-term damage to both males and females. The child becomes sexualized; he sees himself as a sexual object and many times has a difﬁcult time developing appropriate relationships with appropriately aged people.” Testimony from male victims provides a glimpse of the aftermath. In a statement, Deborah Marion Ralph’s victim said he has lost time at work and required expensive therapy: “Depression has been a large portion of both my child and adult life. It has caused me to self-direct my anger, wreaked havoc on relationships, and hindered my career.” The student in the Tania Pontbriand case reported being confused and isolated from friends and family; he remains estranged from his mother. The furtive nature of such relationships can also isolate a student from friends and family, says Shoop: “They become co-conspirators.”

“I never thought that I’d be sleeping with a 30-year-old married teacher of mine,” Pontbriand’s victim said. “I think I was still in denial, pretending it was a normal relationship.”

Testimony shows teenage boys to be emotionally vulnerable as well. The boy involved with Denise Keesee was convinced they would marry. The teenager who Jennifer Mason exploited claimed he still loved her and would go to jail for her. He denied being victimized; Judge Dunnigan disagreed, saying the teenager could be a “a ticking time bomb.”

Retired NHL player Theo Fleury, who was sexually abused as a boy by a male coach, spoke of the unseen damage when he publicly denounced the conditional sentence given former Saskatchewan teacher Bonnie McLachlan, calling it “a slap on the wrist.” “The judge was showing sympathy toward somebody who took an undeveloped adolescent and decided that it was OK to have sexual intercourse with him,” Fleury said, criticizing the judge’s statement that he “could see no physical damage in the boy.” Fleury says the judge “silenced so many people that have been through this.” Jokes on late-night TV have the same effect, says Shoop: “That mocking is why males don’t come forward.”

Even after proven guilty and sentenced, female teachers can be defended, evident on a “Support Tania Pontbriand” Facebook page which attracted more than 150 members, many of them former students. “Unbelievable,” wrote one. “This was probably the best teacher I had in my entire life. It’s funny to see this blown out of proportion just because she was a teacher. No one would have bat[ted] an eye otherwise!” Such statements reveal how much we have to learn, says Shoop. “You hear these women described as an ‘excellent teacher,’ ” he says: “But if you molest children, you can’t be an excellent teacher.”

Silken Laumann is one of Canada’s most decorated rowers, a multiple medallist whose leg was ripped apart in a devastating boat collision in 1992. She famously came back just 10 weeks and multiple operations later to win a bronze medal for Canada at the Barcelona Olympics. After retiring from the sport, she’s built a successful career as a writer and motivational speaker. But her uplifting message of overcoming obstacles with positive thinking, mental strength and courage hid a darker truth. Her middle-class childhood in Mississauga, Ont., was ravaged by a poisonous and abusive relationship with a beautiful, mercurial mother. Seigrid Seideman Laumann’s unpredictable rages, her daughter believes, were rooted in the trauma of her childhood in wartime Germany. Silken’s life was filled with fear, anger and self-loathing, manifested in depression, anorexia and other forms of self-harm­­—damage that carried into adulthood. She chronicles the hard road to a happy, healthier life for herself and her family in Unsinkable, her frank new memoir. The cover photo shows her sleek, muscular and confident, the indented scar on her right leg in prominent display. This is the “whole truth”—scars and all—she told Maclean’s in an interview at her waterfront home outside Victoria.

Q: This book shatters the aura of invincibility that’s always surrounded you. Why would you write it?

A: I felt I couldn’t do anything else in my life until I wrote this book. I’ve spent 12, 15 years speaking about my life, about my experiences. Parts of my past were starting to leak out in the right situation. Suddenly, I was saying a little bit more than I was ready to say. That really prompted me to understand that I needed to tell my story—to process my story by telling it.

Q: When we look at your childhood, your father’s assertions aside, it was not normal at all. It’s one thing to dredge through that in the sanctuary of your therapist’s office; it’s quite another thing to put it on paper. What was that process like?

A: Opening up my life in order to share my experiences and help other people, encourage other people, has been something that I’ve done before. As I went through therapy, I went through the process of discovering how my past was affecting my actions today, who I was as a parent. It was happening in a parallel way to the therapy I was going through. Saying that, the writing process was not only therapeutic, but it brought resolution to certain things. The book took me a long time to write. I was constantly thinking about other people’s feelings, how this would affect this relationship and that relationship. I finally got to a place with it where I just had to write it. I have to have the freedom to just put it out there.

Q: You believe the Second World War scarred your parents—your mother, especially. It leaked into your generation, too, obviously.

A: Many people my age have parents who survived the war, saw and were part of terrible, terrible things. Neither of my parents talked much about the war. My mom’s memory would come out sporadically. I was never quite sure where reality, and memories that were kind of altered and maybe not quite accurate, came together. So it was always hard to distill the accurate storyline of her life.

Q: Your body, your physiology, is exceptional, yet you’ve starved it and you’ve cut it and you’ve failed to appreciate it in a lot of ways. But it’s never failed you. Are you at peace with your body now?

A: Yes, it’s been an enormously long journey, but yes, I am at peace with who I am, what I look like?.?.?.?I don’t worry about the long-term effects of that excessive dieting. I think I was very lucky. A lot of girls and women who have dieted and starved themselves can’t bear children. They have osteoporosis by the time they’re my age. I was very fortunate that sport came along when it did. And actually that rowing came along when it did. The worst of my anorexia was in my running years. By the time I got into rowing [as a teen], it looked more like disordered eating, an unhealthy relationship with food, but I wasn’t constantly starving myself.

Q: I’ve sometimes thought that the training for Olympic rowers was almost a sanctioned form of physical abuse. Is that another way of punishing your body?

A: I think, for me, sport was a way of getting all that energy out. That intensity needed to have a channel. In my very darkest moments as a teenager, where I literally felt like I was going to implode with so much intensity, so much self-loathing turned inward, sport was the outward movement, this burst of intensity and energy that was totally healthy—kind of. Sort of. Maybe. [Laughs.] Looking back, as a 49-year-old, that probably kept me in some sort of balance. I was very good at hurting myself. I was very good at pushing beyond.

Q: Has your family read the book?

A: They all have received the book. Whether they’ve read it or not, I can’t say. But I’ve had conversations with each member of my family, my brother, my sister, my mom and my dad.

Q: I’d say, of all those, you’d be most apprehensive about your mother’s reaction?

A: Actually, I was most apprehensive about my dad’s [response]. Things have been so extreme with my mom. I think my mom has an awareness that, mentally, she hasn’t always been 100 per cent there. She recognizes the kind of behaviour that she had when we were growing up. I think my dad’s role in the family dynamics was holding it all together. Part of that—it’s partly generational—was keeping the secrets, keeping it all on the down-low. So his version of reality was very tightly held. Speaking to him about it has been the hardest.

Q: And you have a stronger relationship with your father.

A: He was much more in my life. My mom left fairly early. She’s lived her life quite independently. I talk to my dad every week. My mom, in five years, I’d say she’s probably called me two times. I call her. We reach out to her, but she’s gone on and done what she needs to do to be as happy as she can possibly be. That was moving away.

Q: Is your father fine with the book?

A: No, he’s really struggled with it. We have had some really intense, painful conversations about it. I think one of my biggest fears was hurting my dad by writing this book, and yet [there was] my need to tell the story: my need to not pretend, to be completely authentic to who I was and be able to get up in front of 250 people and, if it was appropriate, to talk about mental illness, if it was appropriate to talk about depression, if it was appropriate to talk about the bumps and bruises I’ve had that helped make me who I am today, the person that I’m proud to be. That need overrode any short-term damage; I really have felt that the damage to the relationship is short-term. I know my dad loves me. He tells me he loves me every time we speak. We’ve had many conversations since some of the tough conversations we’ve had about the book.

Q: What will you do with this new perception of you? Aren’t you going to feel naked when you stand at the podium?

A: That’s an interesting question. I’m not sure I can answer it yet, because I’ve just started talking about it. I know that the prospect of speaking about it has been very liberating.

Q: What is the central message of this book?

A: We all have our bumps and bruises, the things that we’re hiding. I’m here to tell you that asking for help, being more open with your experiences, seeking support, is worth it. The quality of my life today, the quality of my relationships, the peace that I have within myself, is all a direct result of that hard work of unravelling the past. There is so much pain in the world, so many people living in fear, hiding their past, feeling shame. If I can encourage one person to reach out and say, “Hey, you know what? I need a little help here,” then I think it’s been worth it to write the book.

—

An Excerpt from Unsinkable by Silken Laumann

One scene from my childhood remains indelibly etched in my mind. I am standing, age six, at the top of the stairs in our house on Narva Court in Mississauga, Ont., carrying a beautiful pale blue dress with a navy sash that cascades to the floor. My dad gave the dress to me for my uncle Rolf’s wedding, and I utterly love it.

I’m ashamed. I know I must have done something wrong, but I don’t know what. I want Mom to know what she’s saying isn’t true, but now doubt has crept in. Maybe I am bad. Maybe I am trying to steal Dad’s attention, like she always says.

I remember another scene, this time on the day of Uncle Rolf’s wedding. My mom poses with one hand on a birdbath and the other on her hip. She is wearing a lovely white, flower-embossed gown with a long, light blue train draped around her. On her blond head she wears a sheer blue veil. Today, not even Uncle Rolf’s bride can escape my mom’s need to be in the spotlight.

My mom smacked me many times while simultaneously pummelling me with her words. Her attacks left me convinced that I was a devious, bad person. Her special weapon was a wooden spoon, but the scariest part of her attacks was their randomness. Since her rules felt arbitrary, she was always catching us off-guard. If I dared say something to her that was unpleasant but true, she would give me a puppy-dog expression of, “I am so hurt.” If I didn’t back down, she would tell me how mean and selfish and ridiculous I was, then taunt me about my hairstyle, or my friends, or my teachers—anything she knew I was sensitive about—until I was in tears. Then she would either become sympathetic or accuse me of being hysterical. I had nowhere to turn to legitimize my feelings, and no one to tell me this wasn’t okay.

When I was 10, [my older sister] Daniele was given permission to ride the city bus to the mall with a friend. Desperately wanting to go with her, I made a huge fuss about how unfair it was to have to stay behind. After shouting at me to smarten up, my mom dragged me inside, then beat me with a boot. I was crying and she was screaming. I don’t remember how badly it hurt, but I do remember the shame I felt about my behaviour, and how afraid I was that my sister was now old enough to leave the house on her own—she was becoming independent and I was left behind. When Daniele was gone, my mom’s focus was on me—and I didn’t want any more of her negative attention.

My [younger] brother, Joerg, was a cute, mischievous kid who could do no wrong in my parents’ eyes—at least when he was little. My mom used to take him in her arms, stroke his hair and call him her little liebchen, but I came to believe his upbringing might have been the most confusing of all, caught as he was between my mom’s mercurial moods and my dad’s great expectations. When Joerg was eight, he started sleeping with a knife under his pillow. He never needed to use it, but it lay close as he slept. Years later, when I asked him why, he said, “I didn’t trust Mom.”

I believe my mom loved us in her own way, but in her darkest hours, she would say things like, “I could kill you and then kill myself.” What seemed to transform her words into a frightening possibility was the fact that a distraught mother in a nearby neighbourhood had shot her kids, then herself. Another mother had gassed her family while they were sleeping. My mom would get worked into a frenzy—screaming and sobbing and throwing dishes. She would howl that she was going to gas us all. Her threat was that she would kill herself and take us with her. She never did anything to show that she’d go through with it, but I slept with my window open.

My mom later insisted her threats hadn’t been serious, yet I felt that we lived in an unsafe house. It’s hard to convey just how volatile the situation felt. I remember one day, when my father was out trimming the hedges. There was a woman suntanning in a bikini in the yard next door, and my mother was consumed by jealousy—she felt my dad was staring. To punish him, she went into the basement and pulled out the plug from his power cord so that my dad would have to head down to the basement and plug it in again. This was repeated a few times before my father raced to catch my mother on her way into the basement and lock her in there. Up to this point, it was almost silly—the plotline for an episode of I Love Lucy—but my mom’s rage bubbled over. She grabbed an axe from the basement and hacked her way out through the door. For me, every day felt like it could take that kind of unpredictably scary turn. Perhaps Daniele and Joerg felt the same way, as we schemed together about an escape, for which we created a kit with bandages and a flashlight. We also saved getaway cash and planned whose doorstep we would land on if we needed to make a run for it.

* * *

I was 16 the first time I cut myself with a razor. It was a Friday night and I wanted to go out on a date. So did my dad. If we both went out, Joerg would be left home alone. My dad, Daniele and I had already been butting heads over my desire for independence. They thought I was being too bold, attending events in Toronto and sometimes coming home on the midnight GO train. Since I was focused on training for the Olympics and excelling at school, I didn’t think I was being irresponsible, but this one night, it came to a head.

Furious that I was insisting on leaving, my dad demanded, “You can’t leave Joerg alone all the time. You’re being selfish.”

I was angry, but my dad’s approval was still desperately important to me, and I crumpled in shame. I did feel the need to take care of Joerg, and I worried that my wanting to leave made me a bad person. Everything was falling apart. My mom [had moved out] and my dad was out of the house a lot. The pressure on me felt unbearable. Shaking with conflicting emotions, I went out into the yard and sat under a tree with a razor blade I’d grabbed from the bathroom. I had been playing with this razor for quite some time; whenever self-doubt broke through my fragile facade of confidence, I’d fantasized about slitting a vein, just to end my anguish and confusion and self-hate. I would put its edge to my wrist, and its sharpness would feel so good that I wanted to go deeper to release the pressure building inside me so hard and fast that I felt I might explode. Now, with anger boiling through me, I was both desperate enough and ready enough. I didn’t want to slash my wrist in order to kill myself, nor did I want to injure myself so badly that I would have to go to a hospital—that part of my mind was still working. Instead, I cut lightly but deliberately and repeatedly to release some of my anguish so I could survive. It felt good to bleed, providing temporary relief. It also terrified me that I could do this to myself, and that someday I might possibly be tempted to go further.

Razors continued to attract me, and I would arrive at this place again a few more times after this episode. I’d toy with the razor, drawing it across my wrist in order to nick the skin. Even the thought of being able to do this served as a safety valve, making the pressure I felt more bearable. It became my secret, my private shame, never to be revealed to anyone.

]]>VICTORIA – British Columbia’s children’s watchdog says a girl who was nearly starved to death endured 18 months of horrific abuse after being branded an “evil child” at her grandfather’s home in Saskatchewan.

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond made the comments Tuesday as she released a report examining the tragic treatment of a three and a half year old aboriginal girl who was moved from B.C. to Saskatchewan, where her mistreatment continued.

Turpel-Lafond said policies and standards for placing vulnerable children in homes across Canada must undergo reviews to better support the needs of kids and families.

The girl was confined to the basement of her grandfather’s home, Turpel-Lafond said.

“This child’s best interests were never taken seriously, and as a result she was left in a dangerous situation, severely traumatized and emotionally and physically injured.”

The girl’s grandfather and spouse were sentenced to three years in prison in 2012 for failing to provide the necessities of life for the child, who is currently living in foster care in Saskatchewan.

Turpel-lafond’s report said the Children’s Ministry in B.C. supported sending the child to another province without doing a proper background check on her grandfather, who had a criminal record for abuse and suffered from addictions.

She said it’s a miracle the girl, who now is eight years old, survived her mistreatment.

Turpel-Lafond said that while her authority does not extend beyond B.C., much work needs to be done with regards to monitoring child protection in Saskatchewan.

Her report also urged the federal government to consider assuming an active role in the well-being of aboriginal children under the care of provincial and territorial governments.

The girl, who can’t be named, weighed just 26 pounds when she was removed from her grandfather’s home in the Fort Qu’Appelle area, east of Regina, in 2008.

Her grandfather won custody from her drug-addicted mother in 2007 and took her to Saskatchewan.

During the trial of her grandfather and his spouse, court heard the girl was kept on a cement floor in a windowless room. The couple argued she was nearly starved because they didn’t get enough government aid to feed her.

The girl also had a broken collarbone, but there was no evidence she saw a doctor.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/children-watchdog-says-its-a-miracle-abused-girl-branded-evil-child-survived/feed/1Inquest into starvation death of five-year-old boy hears from foster parenthttp://www.macleans.ca/news/inquest-into-starvation-death-of-five-year-old-boy-hears-from-foster-parent/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/inquest-into-starvation-death-of-five-year-old-boy-hears-from-foster-parent/#commentsMon, 16 Sep 2013 19:31:31 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=423201TORONTO – A foster parent who took in the three surviving siblings of a five-year-old boy starved to death by his grandparents says she was given no prior warning about…

]]>TORONTO – A foster parent who took in the three surviving siblings of a five-year-old boy starved to death by his grandparents says she was given no prior warning about the children’s background or that they had lost a brother.

The woman, who cannot be identified, told the inquest into Jeffrey Baldwin’s death Monday that two of his siblings were conditioned to treat Jeffrey and his similarly abused six-year-old sister as “subhuman.”

It was only through conversations and the children’s behaviour over time that horrifying details began to emerge of the abuse and neglect in Jeffrey’s home.

“They were told that if they told anyone, CAS (Children’s Aid Society) would take them away and everyone would be mean and horrible to them,” the foster mother recounted on the witness stand, where she often grew emotional when describing incidents that took place in the first few days after Jeffrey’s siblings arrived in her home.

When Jeffrey died of complications of chronic starvation in 2002, he weighed 21 pounds — about the same as he did on his first birthday.

The inquest is expected to determine whether enough changes have been made to the child protection system in the 11 years since Jeffrey died, or if there are more improvements that can be made to ensure no other child suffers his fate.

Jeffrey’s grandparents — Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman — were given custody of the boy and his three siblings despite both of them having previous convictions for child abuse.

The inquest’s jury heard about the “hierarchy” that existed among the four siblings, with Jeffrey and his youngest sister at the very bottom — both referred to as “the pigs.”

CAUTION: CONTENTS THAT FOLLOW MAY DISTURB SOME READERS

The foster mother grimaced as she described how Jeffrey’s abused sister arrived in her home with a distended belly, scabs all over her arms and legs and open oozing sores on her feet.

She said it was clear that the oldest sibling and the youngest, who were described as angry and confused kids, had been taught to look down upon Jeffrey and his sister — a way of thinking that was illustrated by how they protested when Jeffrey’s sister sat at the dining table, or when she was allowed to play with the same toys as them.

“(The youngest sibling) asked where the ‘pig wall’ was in my house,” she recalled. “I said ‘We don’t have pigs in this house we have people. He pointed at (his sister) and my youngest daughter and said ‘Those two, they’re the pigs.”

At another point, while Jeffrey’s sister was eating very quickly at the dining table — she had an insatiable appetite — the foster mother remembers the youngest child saying “if she pukes it she has to eat it right, cause at grandma’s house that’s what we did.”

There were also times when the woman found Jeffrey’s sister drinking from the toilet.

“It was something horrific to see a child drinking out of your toilet,” she said, adding that the oldest sibling explained that her sister and Jeffrey “had to wash themselves and their underwear in the toilet, and that was grandma’s idea.”

The woman also recounted instances where Jeffrey’s mistreated sister described the physical abuse she was subjected to by her grandparents, including being whacked with a broom.

In addition to the terrible treatment Jeffrey and his sister were subjected to — which included being locked away in their filthy, cold room while their grandmother babysat a neighbour’s child — the foster mother said all the four children were mistreated in some way by the adults that took care of them.

She said the oldest child told her about the “lickings” — spanking with a metal spoon that their grandfather would subject them to.

“They lined up and had to remove their clothing and underpants. When I asked why they had to take off underpants they said it was so they wouldn’t bleed on them,” she recalled. “And they would watch the person in front of them.”

The foster mother said the hate that the siblings were taught to feel for each other slowly started to dissipate as they talked about what had gone on in their home. The oldest sibling even began wondering if there had been anything she could have done to prevent Jeffrey’s death, the woman said.

“She said she should have told someone to do something…she was sorry she wasn’t nicer to him because he really wasn’t a dog or a pig,” the woman recalled.

“I told her she was the bravest child I had ever known…there was no responsibility that was hers.”

Bottineau and Kidman were ultimately convicted of second-degree murder in Jeffrey’s death and forcible confinement for their treatment of the sister.

]]>TORONTO – Promises to give victims a formal role in Canada’s criminal justice system and to stiffen penalties for child sex predators are important if overdue federal initiatives, two abused former hockey players said Monday.

Speaking after a roundtable with the justice minister, Greg Gilhooly and Sheldon Kennedy said the Conservative government was on the right track, even if details were lacking.

“Right now a victim is simply a witness — we’re at the beck and call of other people,” Gilhooly said.

“To the extent that we can be given a formalized role in the judicial process, that to me would be a wonderfully empowering thing.”

A victim’s bill of rights was one of three get-tough-on-crime themes the government plans to emphasize this year, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said. The aim is to entrench the rights of victims into a single law.

Nicholson also promised stiffer sentences for child-sex predators.

“Their punishment for these crimes must reflect the devastation they cause in the lives of children and their families,” the minister said.

Concerns over sentencing arose after former hockey coach Graham James was jailed for two years last year for assaults on ex-NHL star Theo Fleury and his cousin Todd Holt in the 1980s and ’90s.

The Crown has appealed the sentence as too lenient in a case that also saw the prosecution stay charges involving assaults on Gilhooly as part of James’s guilty plea.

James had already been sentenced to 3 1/2 years in the mid-1990s for assaulting Kennedy and another young hockey player. He served 18 months.

“The key here is that we’re having conversations about the importance of not only rehabilitating the criminals but rehabilitating the victims,” Kennedy said.

“I couldn’t have imagined 16 years ago, when I disclosed my abuse, that we’d be talking about these issues so openly and with such commitment to be making positive change for victims.”

Nicholson said the government will announce specific measures in the weeks and months to come.

Currently, small-time marijuana growers face stiffer mandatory minimum sentences than those who rape children, an irony not lost on Gilhooly, who has a law degree.

“I personally don’t believe that those who grow marijuana deserve to go to jail,” Gilhooly said. Those who commit sexual assaults against children do.”

Still, the government now appears to view sex crimes against children as a priority, even if any measures come too late to help him, Gilhooly said.

“I’m slowly coming to grips with the fact that I was never going to get justice from the justice system,” he said, “It’s more a legal-results system than a justice system.”

Kennedy said the government’s past focus on cracking down on criminals has sometimes left victims — especially child victims — in the legislative cold.

“Sometimes, yeah, absolutely, victims are lost,” he said.

“There is real invisible trauma, invisible damage that happens to these types of victims.”

Nicholson also promised legislation to make public safety the “paramount consideration” in cases where accused criminals are found not criminally responsible by reason of a mental disorder.

He also pledged better use of new technologies to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of bail and extradition regimes.

In recent weeks, Nicholson made a series of funding announcements geared toward child-assault victims.

Liberal justice critic, Irwin Cotler, accused the Tory government of recycling its old crime and punishment agenda.

“There’s nothing in there about access to justice and the need for legal aid,” Cottler said. “Why is it there’s nothing in there about aboriginal justice?”

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/general/feds-promise-victims-bill-of-rights-tougher-sentences-for-child-sex-predators/feed/0Breaking the silence on abusehttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/breaking-the-silence/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/breaking-the-silence/#commentsThu, 01 Nov 2012 15:20:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/?p=306840Stories of violence at a Halifax home for black children spur calls for an inquiry

Former residents of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children have vivid memories of the three-storey, shingled building outside Halifax. Harriet Johnson was eight years old when, in 1977, a social worker drove her past the pillared gates up the long, steep driveway. “She said: ‘This is going to be your new home,’ ” says Johnson, 43, who was seized by provincial authorities from her New Glasgow home when her alcoholic grandfather—her sole guardian—couldn’t care for her.

Within a week, Johnson was beaten with a belt for wetting her bed. At age 9, she says a staff member raped her in a car behind a Dartmouth junior high school. It was the first of many brutal attacks. “I screamed and screamed and begged him to stop,” Johnson wrote in searing 16-page affidavit, one of scores of signed documents from nearly 100 former orphanage residents, alleging physical and sexual abuse at the provincially funded institution. The oldest complaints stem from incidents that date to the late 1930s.

The affidavits form the basis for a class-action suit, which alleges that provincial authorities and home directors ignored widespread abuse and neglect. Though none of the allegations have been proven in court, the case has stirred up emotions in Nova Scotia, where race remains a touchy—often explosive—subject.

Nearly all the former residents are black or mixed race, even though, by the mid-1960s, the home housed white children too. Plaintiffs say the abuse went unchecked, in part, because they were black. Even the use of the word “colored” in the home’s name suggests a pre-civil rights mentality, Johnson says. “I believe this was about racism.”

For years, there were whispers that children at the orphanage were subject to cruelty and neglect. In the late 1990s, former residents began to speak publicly about their treatment. They contacted Halifax lawyer Ray Wagner, who, in 2001, filed the first of dozens of individual lawsuits against the home and provincial authorities. But Wagner says the cases stalled, as did attempts to pry documents from the province.

Last year, Wagner chose a new tack. He filed a class-action suit against the home, later adding the province as a defendant. All told 33 people have signed on, including Johnson. A certification hearing has been scheduled for June 2013 in Nova Scotia Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the individual cases of 56 residents are still before the courts.

The latest allegations have roused police and politicians. An integrated RCMP and Halifax Regional Police sexual assault unit is now investigating 38 complaints. Last week, a series in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald prompted opposition MLAs to call for an inquiry. “If you look at some of the documents, a person can become horrified,” says Progressive Conservative community services critic Keith Bain. He said an inquiry could address complaints faster than the courts. “We have to look at the human aspect of the whole thing. If an inquiry is going to speed up that process of healing that’s what should be done.”

For its part, the home has denied all allegations and argues that too much time has passed to properly investigate the claims. “In many cases, the workers who were at the home at the time are deceased,” says John Kulik, the home’s lawyer.

Wagner disagrees and says the case “is no longer about compensation. It’s about addressing a past wrong.” The home, he says, was chronically underfunded, receiving a fraction of the money that institutions serving white children received.

From its inception in 1921, the home was conceived as a humane refuge for orphaned and homeless black children who would otherwise be sent to mental institutions or poorhouses. As such, it was a source of pride among Nova Scotia’s black community.

That pride kept Tony Smith silent for decades. Smith, 53, spent three years in the home in the mid-1960s. He says he was fondled by female staffers and forced to participate in Sunday afternoon fight clubs. Smith never told a soul until a reporter working on a story about the building’s heritage status contacted him in 1998. “I said: ‘I don’t mind telling you my story, but it may not be the story you want to hear.’ ” Smith then went to police but says he was told his story was too old and the details too sketchy.

Today, the building is boarded up. The home has changed its name and moved to new headquarters, but still serves families in Dartmouth.

Smith wants the home and province to acknowledge the dreadful conditions that young, vulnerable children were subjected to. “I believe personally that in order for these things to be discouraged in the future, there must be compensation and an apology,” Smith says.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/breaking-the-silence/feed/3This isn’t the way to protect our childrenhttp://www.macleans.ca/authors/barbara-amiel/this-isnt-the-way-to-protect-our-children/
http://www.macleans.ca/authors/barbara-amiel/this-isnt-the-way-to-protect-our-children/#commentsTue, 29 Nov 2011 13:40:01 +0000http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/12/01/this-isn%e2%80%99t-the-way-to-protect-our-children/Should we punish Joe Paterno in the 21st century for his retrospective cultural attitudes?

A virus hits American commanders-in-chief when on aircraft carriers. Think George W. Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln declaring we “have prevailed” in front of the Mission Accomplished banner. Or the sombre Richard Nixon doing a mini jig of excitement on board the Hornet at the Apollo 11 splashdown. Hard not to compare them unfavourably with Cher on the USS Missouri in thigh-high stockings and biker jacket, utter fabulosity, even though her lyrics, “If I could turn back time,” were nearly as banal as Dubya’s.

For new lows the ribbon goes to President Obama’s Veterans Day remarks on the USS Carl Vinson. The Penn State scandal, said the American President, should lead to “soul- searching” by Americans. “Our first priority,” he said, “is protecting our kids.” As opposed to what: protecting senior citizens, the economy or perhaps the endangered Kretschmarr cave mould beetle? A bit rich, anyway, in a country where over a million of its potential kids per year get deliberately aborted.

Briefly, in case you have been in a coma: legendary (junior grade) Penn State football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, 67 (there are many “legendary” figures in this story, but as I can’t tell legend from long snapper in American football, I can’t vouch for the designation), has been indicted on 40 charges, all relating to sexual assault on minors. The indictment came via a grand jury convened over years in the absence of the citizen under investigation or proper rules of evidence.

Included are allegations of groping, anal sex in showers and oral sex with young boys met through Sandusky’s program for disadvantaged youths. All very nasty, but unproven before trial, which is already mission unaccomplishable. Prosecutors released the grand jury’s findings of fact to an eager press who advertently misplaced the word “alleged.” Thus the “How many other children could have been sodomized?” reaction of Nancy Grace. I doubt any jury north of Antarctica could try this case fairly.

Two executives at Penn State are charged with perjury and failing to report allegations of child abuse to the police. The graduate assistant who reported a 2002 shower incident to his Penn State superior is now on “indefinite leave.” Legendary coach Joe Paterno, 84, due to retire, has been fired by Penn’s board of trustees together with unlegendary university president Graham Spanier. More alleged victims are coming forward. There is talk of civil suits to be filed on behalf of the victims against the university. Experienced child abuse lawyer Slade McLaughlin is quoted saying lawyers are trolling for clients at the Penn State rallies: “When you’ve got 19, 20 kids coming out, saying ‘he did it, he did it,’ ” explains McLaughlin, “I don’t understand why anyone at Penn State in their right mind would say, ‘Let’s fight this.’ ” Nope, just roll over: if there are funds to be dished out, it’s payday.

Do we want a society in which people who see a crime but don’t report it to the police become criminalized? If you see a mugging and don’t report it immediately to the police you are morally bankrupt but not a criminal. If I tell my boss I saw a fellow employee stealing from the supply cabinet, should I be charged if she doesn’t go to the police? Snitching is the right thing to do in every conceivable sense if you see a child being sodomized, but to create another class of criminals for not snitching doesn’t seem helpful. Such reporting laws are part of what sentencing authority professor Michael O’Hear of the Marquette University law school, in his essay “Perpetual Panic,” refers to as “harmful effects of excessive or misdirected responses” to child sexual abuse. They won’t deter sexual predators, but commit resources to non-productive areas.

Changing emphasis in the culture is another inconvenience. Penn State’s own professor Philip Jenkins, a distinguished historian, in his book Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America, details three waves that peaked in approximately 1915, 1950 and 1985 of “wildly exaggerated and wrongly directed” panic over child abusers, with public interest declining during the 1920s and 1960s. In retrospect, say both Jenkins and O’Hear, 1985 was not the peak but the plateau. We are now in the third decade of this hysteria, with new laws proliferating, harsher sentences and witch hunts based on false memory syndrome and the lure of big payoffs.

Sex with children has rightly never been acceptable in modern times, particularly if physical force is involved, but the age of consent has varied considerably and still does in both the U.S. and Europe, from 13 to 18 years old, according to gender or marital status. Paterno, whose only crime appears to be not going to the police, came of age in the locker rooms of the late forties, where sex with a child would be wrong but likely handled inside the university. Should we punish him in the 21st century for his retrospective cultural attitudes? There is a case to be made for a temporal jurisdiction: crimes committed in the cultural framework of another time may not always yield to trials held in new time.

A statute of limitations (currently removed for child abuse) exists because memories fail, hard evidence may be unavailable, guilt or innocence cannot be established confidently. How can you know which of the adults citing incidents 20 years ago are telling the truth? Is the onus to be on the accused to prove his innocence rather than the accuser to prove his case?

Perhaps Cher was wrong. We can turn back time and have: to the hysteria and methods of 17th-century Salem, to Cotton Mather and his “touching tests” for witches. Not a good bargain for justice and no way to protect our children. But we keep singing the same tune and it’s getting louder.

]]>Hospitals admitted more abused kids with brain injuries as the U.S. economy started to struggle, according to a new study. Published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, the findings come from hospital data on children under age 5 from four states, Reuters reports. From 2004 to 2009, 422 kids were diagnosed with “abusive head trauma,” and 16 per cent of them died of their injuries. In the three years before the crash in December 2007, the rate of abusive head injuries was 8.9 per year per 100,000 kids. After the crash, that number climbed to 14.7 per 100,000.

Junk science, junk politics
Behold: six columns about five things that are more or less to do with federal politics.

The Canadian vision of a carbon tax is all about incrementalism, TheGlobe and Mail‘s Jeffrey Simpson argues. “Higher prices would change behaviour away from carbon-intensive products and lifestyles … [and] people and businesses would have time to adjust” as the tax was “phased in gradually.” But in the past year, gas prices have soared far higher and far quicker than anyone—carbon tax proponents included—anticipated, which imposes all the burdens of a carbon tax with none of the touchy-feely revenue neutrality and tax breaks to farmers and low-income families. As such, Simpson concludes, “the political timing” for Stéphane Dion’s gambit “could not be worse.”

For Dion’s sake, the National Post‘s John Ivison hopes the plan—which will be revealed tomorrow, first to the Liberal caucus and then to the press gallery—is “less patronizing than the ’50 tips on greener living’ that appeared on the Liberal Web site yesterday.” It’ll need attractive packaging, after all, what with its rumoured $200 boost to the cost of heating oil for a single home, its “hogwash” suggestion that prices won’t rise at the pump and, fundamentally, the unnerving fact that a new tax—however purportedly neutral—now forms “the centerpiece of [the Liberals’] election campaign.” Dion “may feel a debt to the planet,” Ivison concludes, “but even his own caucus doubts Canadians are prepared to pay it off with their money.”

Is it Financial Post Comment Junk Science Week 2008 already? Crikey, the year just flew by. Anyhoo, in this year’s first installment, Terence Corcoran goes after anti-pesticide campaigners, and the scandal-happy media, for utterly ignoring Health Canada’s findings that the pesticide 2,4-D is safe when used as directed. (The Ottawa Citizen‘s Dan Gardner already did that, as Corcoran notes, calling the limited reaction to his piece “instructive.”) Corcoran also excoriates the Ontario College of Family Physicians’ Neil Arya for “warping Health Canada’s thorough review of the issue.” (Huh. Gardner already did that too.) And Corcoran promises to explain, in a future article, why the “precautionary principle” cited by so many in the anti-pesticide camp simply doesn’t hold water. (Er… Gardner already did that too. How peculiar!)

It’s awfully easy for Peter MacKay to insist that Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan “report any allegation of unlawful activity they see,” says the Calgary Herald‘s Don Martin. It’s not so easy for soldiers “rumbl[ing] through swaths of opium-producing poppies so vast, a single field would net Canadian law enforcement their average annual seizure”—or, for that matter, for soldiers grappling with the ethical implications of the “man-boy homosexuality [that] has flourished in the aftermath of Taliban zero-tolerance laws.” Many compromises of principle are necessary when engaging a country like Afghanistan, Martin argues, and there are many wrongs Canadian troops have no capacity to right. But that doesn’t mean allegations of child rape by Afghan police officers shouldn’t be reported. Ideally, he says, “Afghan officers being trained in law enforcement can be pressured to practice it themselves.”

The Star‘s James Travers yet again rehashes his version of the NAFTA memo debacle, in which high-ranking Tories “put ideology ahead of national interest by recklessly interfering in the U.S presidential campaign.” And for the first time since… uh, his last column, he argues that John McCains’ upcoming visit to Canada will reenergize the scandal.

The Vancouver Sun‘s Barbara Yaffe talks to Senator Bert Brown about his quest to convince the provinces to begin electing Senators—as he was in Alberta. “It would take five years to achieve a majority of elected senators,” Yaffe notes. “Once that happens, the public, says Brown, would soon demand that provinces have equal representation.” But with Ontario noncommittal and Quebec firmly opposed to the idea, Yaffe says “the news on this front is not terribly good.”

Duly noted
The Globe‘s Christie Blatchford provides a thorough—and thoroughly icky—biography of Mubin Shaikh, the Sharia proponent-cum-cocaine user-cum-army cadet-cum-aspiring jihadi-cum-RCMP informant who’s now the lynchpin in the so-called “Toronto 18” terrorism trials and Blatchford’s… ugh, please don’t make us say it… “first Muslim crush.” “He’s a devout Muslim in the midst of a largely godless country, with one foot in Islam and the other in the Timmy’s, a man who prays five times a day and names his son Mujahideen, but who does doughnuts outside the Canadian Tire ‘because I can’t resist a freshly snow-covered parking lot,'” she writes, mistily. But “he’s still my imaginary Muslim boyfriend.” Regular readers will know we hold Ms. Blatchford in high esteem, but blech!

On the occasion of Jean Charest criticizing Mario Dumont’s proposals to stem the growth of the Quebec’s provincial debt, the Montreal Gazette‘s Don MacPherson notes that it was just two years ago that Charest “made debt reduction a major theme of the latter part of his government’s first term in office.” Luckily, he notes, the Premier has since decided there’s no need “to reduce the size of the debt in absolute terms” as long as it shrinks in proportion to the GDP. “Quebec still rank[s] second-last among the provinces” by that measure, MacPherson writes, but Charest can at least legitimately claim to be making progress.

Andrew Cohen‘s Tour of Europe for the Citizen brings him to Lodz, in Poland, where he assesses the country’s post-industrial efforts to achieve normalcy—which, having been “kept down so long,” is all it really wants. “Poland is a quite mediocre country in some regards,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk tells Cohen (though certainly not when it comes to outrageous statements about soccer referees!). “The only natural resource that we have, and with which we can compete, is freedom.”

Barack Obama’s focus on the responsibilities of African-American fathers “is the racial equivalent of Nixon going to China,” says the Globe‘s John Ibbitson, and “it is uncertain what political advantage Mr. Obama hopes to gain from raising this subject.” But given Obama’s own tumultuous (if not necessarily unhappy) childhood family situation, Ibbitson says it’s clearly “deeply personal.”

And finally, the Globe‘s Margaret Wente phones in a few hundred words of piffle about Google. It’s robbing us of our once-indomitable attention spans, she maintains, but at least, during a recent trip to Chicago, it informed her and her sister what the leashed monkey (see below, right) in Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte represents. “The monkey is a satirical comment on bourgeois profligacy,” she gushes. “Without Google, we never would have known!”

Departmental briefings
Criticism and advice for the ministries of Foreign Affairs, Citizenship and Immigration, Finance and Defence. And a finger in the eye for the Liberals.

The Calgary Herald‘s Don Martin implores Foreign Affairs to get Brenda Martin (who is clearly of no relation) home from Mexico as soon as is humanly possible—guilty, innocent, whatever; he just wants the whining to end. “Canadians increasingly find it tiresome to hear griping from someone who has received more media and government attention than all other foreign-held Canadians combined,” he writes, “most of them proclaiming their innocence with the same gusto Martin has shown.” Indeed, he rather trenchantly suggests, “the only apparent difference between the Martin case and so many others seems to be her regular access to phones.”

Although last week’s Michael Ignatieff fundraising event raised many awkward leadership-related implications for the Liberals, Sun Media’s Greg Weston says the biggest problem still comes down to cold, hard cash. With a spring election still very much a possibility, he argues, the “party bagmen are already attempting to pry the same pennies from the same Grit pockets as Ignatieff and the former leadership contenders who are trying to pay off their debts.” If Dion dug in his heels after inevitably losing the election, that would cost more untold millions for a leadership review convention. And if he lost, “all those wanting to be his replacement would be back begging the same party donors for more millions.”

Foreign-trained doctors who come to Canada eager to contribute have terrible trouble landing the residency positions they need to become accredited in Canada, John Ivison writes in the National Post, and yet our teaching hospitals “have been accepting trainees from foreign countries in record-breaking numbers—all of whom come here at their governments’ expense and then return home once fully trained.” This is largely a visa issue, Ivison notes, and as such “Ottawa should take a serious look at whether Canada’s long-term interests are being hawked for short-term profit. If they are, a moratorium on the university intake of foreign trainees should be put in place, pronto.”

Why don’t Americans seem to care about the massive deficits that their government runs, and that the three remaining presidential candidates propose to continue running? “Maybe the numbers are too large to be understood,” TheGlobe and Mail‘s Jeffrey Simpsonsuggests. “Maybe the U.S. anti-tax attitude is so deep that it trumps all else.” Thankfully, he opines, here in the civilized north, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin bravely dragged us kicking and screaming out of the deficit era. Which makes it all the more odd, Simpson writes, is that a Conservative government would risk falling back into deficit by increasing spending and transfer payments, and cutting business taxes and the GST, at a time when the economy seems poised to go into the tank.

The Globe‘s Doug Saunders reports that soldiers and military commanders on the ground in southern Afghanistan are welcoming plans by American forces to go on the offensive in Helmand province against what U.S. General Dan McNeill calls some “truly intractable dudes.” What they’re not so sure about, however, is the proposed “Americanization” of their own missions, “including lengthier deployments for soldiers, harder-line opium-poppy-eradication strategies and the use of military forces in reconstruction and humanitarian work.” It won’t be an issue for Canadian troops for now, says Saunders, but it will be once the much-vaunted 1,000 American troops arrive in Kandahar province. One unnamed Canadian official hopes the Marines “can do their learning over there [in Helmand], make their mistakes over there,” before they start working with the Canadians and other troops under Canadian command.

How to solve the food crisis
The Toronto Star‘s James Travers argues that the growing global food crisis is a golden opportunity to help small farms in Third World countries vastly increase their yields. “Driving smallholder yields from low to high makes better long-term sense than supercharging already superproductive corporate farms,” he writes, but it takes a lot of money, time and effort to get the fertilizer and infrastructure to where it’s needed. Unfortunately, he says, “it’s easier and more politically rewarding to simply prime the domestic farm pump.”

If the Globe‘s Margaret Wente had a time machine, she might also have a column worth reading about all the unintended consequences of the biofuels revolution. But she doesn’t have a time machine.

Duly noted
“Indiana is everything,” John Ibbitson writes in the Globe. “If Mr. Obama can take it, he refutes Ms. Clinton’s accusation that white, blue-collar workers won’t vote for him, especially in the Rust Belt states of the Midwest.” And he says it would really, really help if Jeremiah Wright went “away, far away, to some place without phone service, and stay[ed] there until after the general election.”

The Edmonton Journal‘s Graham Thomson gets letters after arguing, as he did on Saturday, that Greenpeace risked turning Ed Stelmach into a victim by disrupting his speeches and lumping him in with baby seal murderers. After all, Thomson contended, Albertans did elect the guy. “What, all 20 per cent of eligible voters who voted for his party?” one reader quips. It’s a fair point, Thomson agrees, but he’s sticking to his guns, arguing that this is simply one of the many injustices inherent in Alberta politics. Now that it turns out one of the Greenpeace stuntmasters was an NDP staffer, for example, her boss—MLA Rachel Notley—has to decide whether to discipline her and risk the ire of her environmental supporters, or give her a free pass and be portrayed “as an accomplice to a political stunt aimed at the premier.” Such is political life in Wild Rose Country.

The Globe‘s Christie Blatchford looks at the case of a German child rescued from his abusive father with the help of Toronto Police Detective Constable Warren Bulmer, whose detailed evidentiary analysis of child pornography has helped identify nearly 50 victims around the world. But the German case highlights an emotional paradox in Bulmer’s work, she notes, in that local police allowed both the boy and his father to be photographed and identified. “Instead of simple euphoria that the sexual abuse has been stopped, ‘I also start to feel bit worse,'” says Bulmer. “On the one hand, the boy has been freed from a life of sexual assaults. On another, in one fell swoop, he has been orphaned and outed.”

Andrew Cohen writing in the Ottawa Citizen, laments the impending closure of Tempelhof Airport in what was West Berlin, the main staging area for the 1948-1949 airlift that kept the city alive during the Soviet blockade and site of many other historical events. But “it isn’t just about war,” he adds. Sitting in the massive, “Teutonic icon” of a terminal building “is to recall aviation when flying was about romance, elegance and style.” (There’s a lot of that going around lately, for some reason.)

“The letter carriers I’ve met are perfectly decent, hard-working chaps,” Jonathan Kay writes in the Post. But if even a few of the rank-and-file share their union leadership’s views on Israel—in CUPW’s words: “boycott, divestment and sanctions”—he wonders if Israeli interests in Canada can count on receiving their mail. Besides which, he argues, all the anti-Israel rhetoric, “communist clichés and Trudeau-era anti-capitalist paranoia” littering the union’s website are just bad for business. “If you have something to send to Tel Aviv, would this … information make you more or less likely to use Canada Post?” (Our answer: we couldn’t possibly be less likely to use Canada Post to send anything anywhere under any circumstances whatsoever.)